Taking a quick tour through some of the spatial data here. Most of these metrics will also be available to peruse on the Shiny app, with the exception of those that are hard to aggregate, like biodiversity hotspots.
1 Land Use
This is the MRLC 30m LULC layer from 2023. Below the map, you can find a table with codes and descriptions. Sort or expand to see all the values.
LULC Diversity is derived from the MRLC LULC layer above. LULC types are aggregated by category (water, developed, barren, forest, shrubland, herbaceous, cultivated, wetlands) and Shannon diversity is calculated for each county. It makes for an interesting metric, but I’m not sure it makes for a strong normative metric. If anyone has thoughts on what the “right” amount of LULC diversity is, I’d love to hear from you.
The Vermont ANR Biofinder has lots of great layers. Technical abstracts for these layers can be found here. Below is a map of rare, threatened, and endangered species polygons statewide. Note that these are lumped together into a multi-polygon to save some space, but the individual polygons didn’t provide a whole lot useful information anyway.